INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
HowNow, the workforce learning platform, has raised $3 million (£2.4 million) in a &pre-series A& funding round
The round is led by Mark Pearson Fuel Ventures and brings the total raised by the startup to $4.5 million.
Other investors include Andy
Murray OBE; Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce (founders of Thomsons Online Benefits); Bernie Sinniah (former managing director at Citi
Bank); and Alwin Magimay (a former partner at McKinsey).
Designed for organisations that want to support teams with self-directed learning
and the development of &business-critical& skills, HowNow is described as an integrated learning platform that autonomously curates
learning resources, &business intelligence& and market insights that live in various internal and external sources.
The idea is to bring
together these different learning resources — ranging from &nuggets& of knowledge shared by existing employees to internal data to
external content libraries, blogs and podcasts — and match these to different job descriptions and employee skill-sets.
This is powered by
a browser extension and integrations with Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot and more than 300 other apps
Machine-learning is also employed to push the right content to the right employee.
&Employers can also use HowNow to identify skills gaps
within the company based on job market data, via HowNow real-time analytics and built-in certification,& adds the company
To achieve this, the platform claims to monitor more than 20,000 job specifications to understand the in-demand skills and requirements
companies are searching for.
&Based on self-review, peer-review and real-time job market data we build the user skill profile as they
onboard the platform,& explains HowNow co-founder and CEO Nelson Sivalingam
&Once in HowNow, they see learning recommendations based on assigned learning pathways, their role, skill requirements and internal
This content is brought together from a variety of their internal sources (G Drive, Sharepoint, CRM, etc.), external sources (content
libraries, blogs, podcasts, etc.) and the autonomously organised knowledge shared by their peers directly on HowNow.&
Employees can then
access these learning resources directly within the applications they already work with and receive contextually relevant suggestions
powered by HowNow &AI.& &For example, they can be in Slack and search all of their learning resources directly from their using the HowNow
Slack app,& says Sivalingam
&They can also convert a message from a colleague into a nugget that will get stored and autonomously organised in HowNow.&
Similarly,
Sivalingam says that, via HowNow, client-facing teams are able to access up-to-date product knowledge, business intelligence and market
insights directly within their inbox, CRM and help desk, which enables them to reduce customer response times.
&Fast-growing companies like
GymShark are able to capture the knowledge in the heads of their internal subject matter experts by giving them a quick and easy way to
share knowledge, build a glue between scattered content, avoid repeat questions and get everyone on the same page,& he adds.
To that end,
I&m told that more than 500,000 users currently use HowNow within over 125 businesses
These range from SMEs to larger organisations, across 14 different countries
A classic SaaS play, the startup generates revenue through a licence fee per user.
